Created and performed by performance artist Stefanie Batten Bland and composer-musician Daniel Bernard Roumain, CLOSE UP premiered at the Theater at MIT in Cambridge on March 13. The piece brings together both makers' unique yet intertwined French Creole ancestries - his roots are Haitian, hers Louisiana Creole - with their multifaceted artistic practices. The result is a layered dreamscape, both intimate and theatrical, that unfolds before us.
The program begins virtually in the dark, though we make out a wall of fabric to our right with two chairs in front of it. For some reason, perhaps because of the way the fabric drapes, it reminds me of the back curtain of one of those voluminous royal canopy beds we often see in movies, great houses, and museums.
Whispering voices and giggles—a man's and a woman's, Bernard Roumain's and Batten Bland's—come from behind the curtain, drawing us in. "I love her voice." "I don't speak Creole. I try." A scratchy recording plays: a raspy-voiced older woman singing in a French patois. Is hers a Creole lullaby, an incantation? Whether or not we are familiar with the song or the language, in just these first few seconds of CLOSE UP, we are transported to the past, to memory, and to ancestry.
The silhouette of a woman wearing the suggestion of a petticoat emerges on the curtain screen. She bends over in silence, struggling to tame her wild curls beneath a head wrap. From this shadow play, though devoid of color, we understand her to be a Black woman. The skirt suggests a colonial space where European, African, and Indigenous cultures meet: the very definition of Creole. She reaches her index finger to her lips, miming a shhh, as if we should not tell anyone what we have seen. Electric strings reverberate beneath the action.
